Argentina Trip - 2007

Canfordian Lizzie Batchelor reflects on 2007's Partnership trip to Argentina:

Until this July, I'd never really travelled before. I could have boasted of visits to South Africa, of being on familiar terms with some parts of southern Spain, and of a few school trips to France and one to Berlin, as well as many other visits to various cities and villas in sunny parts of Europe.  However, until I was driven through the suburbs of Buenos Aires, and until I had met the children and staff of the Hogar el Alba, the home of Canford's Argentina partnership, I had never really seen the point. A foreign country had always been to me nothing more than the sum of its art galleries, shops, sights and airports. Never before had its native language, its currency, its different customs and routines, its problems and poverty and, most importantly, its people really formed a key part of my experience.

I had never been integrated into a different country's culture before. My argument for not learning languages past the bare GCSE minimum had always been, "Well, everyone speaks English these days anyway," and now all I can think of is what a small bubble I was living in!  So much of the world?'s population can barely read and write, yet I expected a group of children who'd probably never met any English people, who live on the other side of the Earth, magically to understand me. Thank God for the few people brave and patient enough to translate for the rest of the group, and of course for non-verbal communication, which is highly under-rated.

We spent much of our time playing with the children, talking to them and the Hogar staff about our varying lifestyles, telling people what to do and being told what to do, so any means of communication proved vital, no matter how simple. Even being the ones to wash up after dinner and clean the toilets had a certain appeal, because it meant that we were looking after ourselves within the Hogar, and hopefully pulling our weight. We weren't in a hotel, we were doing the same things the staff were doing.

We were privileged on our visit to be welcomed and integrated right into this world so different to our own, with some of the most unfortunate children in Buenos Aires and the people who work so hard to help them.  It was incredible meeting a group of people so willing to open their lives up to us, and of course leaving them after so short a time was, in a way, almost like desertion, because it didn't really feel like anything we could have done in those two weeks would have been enough to pay them back for their kindness.

Of course, we didn't go to Argentina simply to be integrated into a completely different society and way of life from our own. No, we spent a year raising money and funds because money is what the home needs - money for new buildings and to continue helping the children as much as possible. And when we got to Argentina we carried on helping and being useful to them in any way we could, which mostly meant doing the rather mundane but very useful task of wall maintenance, complete with sanding, scraping, plastering and painting. Fortunately for morale and our aching hands these practical efforts were balanced out with some really enjoyable trips out of the home into the more touristy areas of the city. We took the children out into the country to a traditional ranch which I personally remember for the horse-riding opportunity more than anything else; we went into the city centre to see the sights, including the Boca-Junior football grounds and Eva Peron's grave; we took a trip down the river delta to see some of the more expensive riverside accommodation and a former president's house which is completely preserved in a giant glass box.

If you ask most people returning from any one of the Partnership visits what it was like, they will tell you what an educational, eye-opening experience they have had, but what does that really mean? In our case it meant really meeting and bonding with the children at the home, hearing their stories from them first hand, and making an immediate, personal impact by giving the children the love and attention that they may have lacked for so much of their lives. Knowing that we could make that much difference to the lives of people who we would otherwise never have known, people from a completely different culture with different values which we are normally blind to and who we seemingly share no common ground with, shows both what a large place the world really is, and how much difference one person can make to it